Austin Latham, developed his trademark use of dashed lines for both the fantastical and the earthly - lending magic to fairy wings, castles and trees alike. The delicate touch of his line draws on illustrations he had already begun work on for his magnum opus Peeps Into Fairyland which would be published four years later. Though evidently executed by the same hand that contributed to Legends From Fairyland , this marks a noted departure from the collaborative work with his brother and the development of a personal style. This style found expression in works published in the postwar years, a prolific period whose publication history began with the two books mentioned above, but had its creative origins much earlier, with preparatory drawings made during the war itself. Work for the most enduring of these, Peeps Into Fairyland , was begun in 1915, some nine years before publication. The archive shows Knowles’s desire for an aesthetic unity across prose, calligraphy, decoration and illus- tration from the book’s infancy in the summer of 1915 until its final deco- rations drawn in 1923. Each page is conceived as an individual creation, and every element of the book has its original design in the archive. Evidently proud of his brother’s work, Reginald Knowles immedi- ately wrote to his publisher J. M. Dent commending Horace’s work to them: “I thought you would like to look through . . . my brother’s new book. It is rather unique in that he has both written & illustrated it, & drawn every scrap of it even to the printer’s
Above: Photographic portrait of Knowles, c. 1917, re- tained by his family. Below: Pen and ink drawing for Pixie-Land , an un- published early project, 1916 (Item 14). Opposite: Finished pen and ink drawings from Peeps Into Fairyland, 1924 (Item 24).
16 HORACE J. KNOWLES
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